With all eyes closely watching the developing hybrid war between Russia and Ukraine, it's worth

looking at the recent history that brought us to this place and how it informs current activity

in the region. My guess today has done just that.

Kenneth Gears is ambassador for the NATO Cooperative Cyber Center of Excellence and a

senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. He's editor of the book Cyber War in

Perspective, Russian Aggression Against Ukraine, published in 2015.

So I moved to Estonia in the spring of 2007 during that nation's crisis with Russia over a Soviet

statue that

Estonia wanted to move.

Moscow decided to use it for propaganda war.

And they're wound up being after the political fight,

a weeks long distributed denial of service attack against banks

in Estonia, the media, government, and so while it wasn't a national security crisis, it was a proof of

concept or an experiment in that direction.

And so many people wanted to know whether, you know, for a country like Estonia that

invests in, you know, in electronic government and digital society.

What would happen if you shut that down?

So the center is not operational in the military sense.

It's more like a think tank, but it does research on computer

security topics as they relate to national security. And now even countries outside of NATO, including Finland and Sweden and Japan and New Zealand and Switzerland, have taken part in exercises and some of them are not full members but they participate

on a daily basis in the center's activities.

So in 2015 the organization published a report titled Cyber War in

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